I have seen this in several books about Fascist Italy…the famous claim that the dictator Mussolini made the trains run on schedule. yet, I cannot find exactly WHO uttered the line!
is it another one of those stories that got passed around so many times that the truth will never be known?
I have a friend who lived through the fascist period of italian history…and he said that the trains NEVER ran on time, Mussolini or not!
Also, I also read that Mussolini (supposedly) told one of his chiefs to leave the lights on in the government buildings all night-so that the Italian people would think that their leaders were working hard on solving Italie’s problems…is this another apocryphal remark? 
Here’s what Snopes has to say on the trains running on time
As for the other claim: That’s the first I’ve heard of it.
Don’t know whether Mussolini should get the credit, but whenever I’ve been to Italy, the trains have been very punctual and far more efficient than the banks or the hotels or anything else. Odd.
Scheduled train services are usually not all late or all on time, so even if this UL were true, it would be more along the lines of “Mussolini improved the on-time performance of Italian passenger trains from 50% to 70%”, or some such value. But of course that doens’t make a very good tag line.
In any event, I dimly remember one of the rail enthusiast publications some years back saying that trains did run closer to scheduled time under Mussolini, but that this was mainly because the railway lengthened the schedules, something Amtrak has done from time to time for trains that are chronically late.
Thing is, ever since World War 2, “making the trains run on time” has been a slogan used almost exclusively by the Left!
That is, there aren’t any latter-day conservatives going around saying “Well, Mussolini went too far, but he did some good things too- he made the trains run on time.”
No, the phrase is used almost exclusively by liberals who want to disparage the accomplishments of conservatives and/or Republicans in general. Mention that crime went down in New York City during Rudy Giuliani’s term, and you’re liable to get a smirk and a snide “Sure, and Mussolini made the trains run on time” from an angry liberal. The phrase is used almost exclusively to mean “The alleged accomplishments of a conservative/Republican politico aren’t significant enough to outweigh his general evilness.”
Well, glad you could get that off your chest, Astorian, but what the heck does your little anti-liberal rant have to do with the question posed in the OP?
Denis Mack Smith touches on this in his Mussolini (1981; Granada, 1983, p128), which is also one of the main sources for that Snopes page on the railway issue. His phrasing is that “staff sometimes had orders to leave a light in his office at night to create the impression that he was working late”. This and the surrounding couple of sentences are footnoted, but I’ve no idea which of the half-dozen references in the footnote might be a relevant one.